*:Wordpress is one if the most popular blogging systems in the world but is routinely used to shoehorn complex sites into a blog shaped box, often because of it's flexibility and ease of use. In this talk, Mandalorian's Steve Lord discusses common Wordpress security snafus and how to avoid them.

*:Wordpress is one if the most popular blogging systems in the world but is routinely used to shoehorn complex sites into a blog shaped box, often because of it's flexibility and ease of use. In this talk, Mandalorian's Steve Lord discusses common Wordpress security snafus and how to avoid them.

OWASP Royal Holloway University of London

Welcome to the Royal Holloway University of London chapter homepage. The chapter leaders are Dennis Groves and Dinis Cruz. Click here to join the local chapter mailing list.

Participation

OWASP Foundation (Overview Slides) is a professional association of global members and is and open to anyone interested in learning more about software security. Local chapters are run independently and guided by the Chapter_Leader_Handbook. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit professional association your support and sponsorship of any meeting venue and/or refreshments is tax-deductible. Financial contributions should only be made online using the authorized online chapter donation button. To be a SPEAKER at ANY OWASP Chapter in the world simply review the speaker agreement and then contact the local chapter leader with details of what OWASP PROJECT, independent research or related software security topic you would like to present on.

Thursday, March 8th 2012, 18:30-21:00 (Royal Holloway)

Location

Talks

Abstract: Cryptography is being widely implemented in software to provide security features. The main reason is that, many cryptographic mechanisms are mathematically proven secure, or trusted secure given some mathematical reasoning. However, to take full advantages of these mechanisms, they must be implemented strictly according to the theoretical models, e.g., several cryptographic mechanisms must be used together, in a specific manner to provide a desired security goal. However, without strong cryptographic background, many software developers tend to deviate from these models, thus making their own security software a gold mine for attackers. This talk gives examples to show why such situations exist, where do they spread, and how bad they may turn into.

"In the recent months major trusted CAs providing trusted certificates for SSL/TLS in browser scenarios were compromised (e.g. seen in the Diginotar breach) and based on the current trust models (trusting all registered CAs equally for all domains) exposed vital web applications to the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks. Several approaches are currently discussed to mitigate this risk. The most advanced and closest to final adoption being the technologies discussed by the browser vendors at the recent IETF meeting in November in Taipei: HSTS and pinning of certificates. To better protect content providers against the distribution of bogus certificates, an HTTP header extension containing a fingerprint of their certificates linked to a domain address has been defined. This approach, which has been partly tested in Chrome, and already helped identify and protect to some extend Google's web application in the recent Diginotar compromise. Chrome users were able to detect the bogus DigiNotar certificates because Chrome had embedded the hashes of valid Google certificates. Back in July, the hacked DigiNotar certificate authority (CA), which has since gone out of business, was used to issue more than five hundred bogus certificates for companies including Google and various intelligence services."

Thursday, September 8th 2011

Title: Doing it for the Lulz: Why Lulzsec has shown us to be an
ineffective industry.

Bio: Daniel Cuthbert is one of the Open Web Application Security
Project Leaders and the Assessment manager for SensePost. He has been
researching, and involved, with web application security since the
late 90’s and has worked on a wide range of projects to ensure that
the development life cycle is secure and the overall application can
withstand today’s hackers.

Directions to Royal Holloway and a Campus Plan are available from the following website (Bourne LT 2 is in building 31 on the Campus Plan).

Friday, June 3rd 2011

Wordpress is one if the most popular blogging systems in the world but is routinely used to shoehorn complex sites into a blog shaped box, often because of it's flexibility and ease of use. In this talk, Mandalorian's Steve Lord discusses common Wordpress security snafus and how to avoid them.